The inside story of our Salesforce digital partnership

The launch of World-Check Customer Risk Screener on the Salesforce AppExchange highlights a digital partnership in action as we step up the fight against financial crime and enhance customer on-boarding.

We have worked together with Salesforce for 18 years, with World-Check Customer Risk Screener a new, innovative technology solution.

The digital partnership with Salesforce is based on shared core values of trust, innovation and growth, among others.

Trust in a digital partnership means being able to fail together, so that boundaries are pushed and weakness is turned into strength.

Technology is helping companies adapt to a changing regulatory landscape.

Salesforce, the pioneer in cloud computing, built its reputation by putting customers at the center of its business, being digital first and agile always. In doing so, Salesforce is a natural partner for us.

We are also committed to providing its customers with solutions to help fight financial crime, including on behalf of global corporate and financial services companies.

The recently launched World-Check Customer Risk Screener is a first-of-its-kind application, designed to drive improved workflow and help clients more efficiently on-board and manage customer risk screening using Salesforce.

We recently spoke with John Higgins from Salesforce about how his company looks at digital partnerships, and how it creates truly lasting technology solutions for its customers through the Success Cloud.

The Success Cloud is a comprehensive group that focuses on ensuring every customer has the best possible experience with Salesforce — and can transform its business and products using Salesforce advisory services.

Success Cloud is people, products and services that help customers successfully adopt the Salesforce Platform and complete their digital transformations.

Salesforce creates a comprehensive experience to ensure that every customer gets the best out of Salesforce, and we support that adoption by providing the people, methodologies, innovations and strategies they need to adopt Salesforce successfully.

It’s more than cloud services — it’s Customer Success as a Service (CSaaS).

Q: In this latest digital partnership, what have been the key learnings?

A: Being candid, one of the reasons we love working in partnership is that it is based on learning.

When embracing a 100 percent digital and agile first method of delivery, it’s really important that teams have permission to fail fast and fail often as long as they measure everything.

We’re finding new ways of working and changing how teams come together to deliver business outcomes.

The World-Check Customer Risk Screener work was a great digital partnership project where our teams have worked together to serve a mutual customer need through leveraging platform technology and thinking to create opportunities to enable mutual customers.

Q: What are the shared values and behaviors that you think are most important to this digital partnership?

A: Wow, that’s a big question, but let me give it a shot.

Over the years I’ve noticed that teams and companies have similar values. Priorities may differ, but there’s normally commonality of the core ingredients.

We share core values of trust, innovation, and growth, among others. I’ve yet to see someone stand up in a meeting with an allergic reaction to a set of company values!

Behaviors, on the other hand, they can tell you a lot.

Over the years, I’ve observed that behaviors across employees can become disconnected with stated values. There’s always a common theme when this happens: pressure.

When people are under pressure, they can sometimes take short-cuts, be tough on themselves, or be tough on other members of the team. This is where our partnership thrives.

At the very heart of the partnership is trust: trust that we can fail together, we should fail together, as if we don’t fail we’re not learning or pushing the boundaries. We then turn weakness into strength.

And with trusted trialing, we are able to succeed together, in ways that we couldn’t do individually. It’s a beautiful thing to see in action.

Q: What can our customers look forward to from this partnership?

A: Well, one of the most interesting things to me is the alignment between focussing on a vision for customer experience improvement and Salesforce’s drive to create and enable “customer companies.”

The work we’ve done over the last few years together has been laser-focused on customer experience, and the examples we’ve discussed so far are 100 percent digital projects.

By committing to shared values, and aligning ways to maximise our partnership, we’re developing more digital channels to support the customer base.

We are working together in a way that is outcome-led, and takes advantage of the best aspects of agile and experience design.

Customer insight and feedback is now fundamental to the digital customer experiences that are offered, and we’re working to ensure that every customer is delighted with every interaction they have — every time.

The screener is accessible through Salesforce Sales Cloud, Financial Service Cloud and Service Cloud to connect information and help customers manage the risk and complexity of client screening, from the initial stages of on-boarding through the entire lifecycle, and including prospective and repeat customers.